documenting my journey from a stable, professional career to a traveler around the world

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Day 9 - Siem Reap back to Bangkok

Another Travel Day - Took a taxi from Siem Reap to Poipet to cross the border to Thailand. The process was painless since we were there pretty early in the morning. There weren't as many foreigners as when we arrived from Thailand to enter Cambodia.

When we got to the Thai side, people were trying to sell us bus tickets to Bangkok on the government buses that we intended on using. We couldn't understand what the catch was, but were cautious and refused to purchase them from these people just in case these tickets were fake. We took a tuk-tuk to the bus station and purchased our tickets ourselves. In hindsight, I think the tickets they were selling were legitimate, but they were just trying to sell them to make a little profit, even if it's pocket change...

We're staying at a hotel in Bangkok in Sukhumvit, which is a heavily touristy area. Again, lots of foreigners were walking around. The crowd seems the most diverse of all the cities I've traveled to so far. I see Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians, Europeans, Australians, and lots of older white men who are probably "sexpats" defined by wikitravel as:

fifty-plus, bald, beer belly, stained shirt, lovestruck expression and a hairy arm wrapped around a girl too young to be his daughter He's found what he's looking for.

At the end of the night we stopped by Pratunum market, which is a large outside market selling anything and everything. The selection here was much greater than in Siem Reap, where there were maybe 10 different types of products being sold in the hundreds of stalls in the tourist area.